IAC: “Such As McIntyre and McKitrick”

Marcel Crok of the Netherlands had an interesting exchange with the Netherlands-based InterAcademy Council this week – see his blog post here.

Noticing that the InterAcademy Council’s IPCC Review was holding hearings in Montreal and that presenters were being imported from Europe (e.g. Robert Watson, Hans von Storch), Marcel wrote to the IAC at 4 pm on Thursday June 10 (see here for full letter):

Given the fact that the meeting is in Montreal and that both McIntyre and McKitrick live relatively close from there (compared to Watson and Von Storch for example), this means that the IAC Panel has decided deliberately not to seek evidence from them.

This screams for an explanation in my opinion. A clear explanation from the IAC Panel about this decision would therefore be highly appreciated.

William Kearney, titled as Spokeperson for InterAcademy Council Review of IPCC, Amsterdam, and Director of Media Relations, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. wrote back to Marcel at 6:52 pm Friday June 11 (00:52 a.m. Saturday June 12 Dutch time)
saying that members of the panel were interviewing “dozens of scientists and other stakeholders with insight and views on the IPCC process, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick” as follows:

Given that the InterAcademy Council committee reviewing IPCC processes and procedures expects to deliver a peer-reviewed report by Aug. 30, it has limited time for presentations at its public meetings and therefore has chosen speakers who are current leaders of IPCC or who can offer representative and varying perspectives of IPCC processes based on prior IPCC experience. Meanwhile, members of the committee are interviewing dozens of scientists and other stakeholders with insight and views on the IPCC process, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. A questionnaire also has been sent to hundreds of scientists and stakeholders, and posted to our website so the public has an opportunity to offer input. The presentations, interviews, and answers to questionnaire all will be taken into consideration as part of the committee’s review.

“Interviewing dozens of scientists and other stakeholders with insight and views on the IPCC process, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick”.

In fact, neither Ross nor I have been interviewed by them nor have we been approached by anyone from the InterAcademy review as to our availability for an interview – something that might have been easily arranged while members were in Canada. One really wonders why organizations like this make untrue statements, when they are certain to be checked.

The InterAcademy Council did something else that was, shall we say, a bit sly. When Marcel wrote to them on Thursday, not only had we not been included in the “dozens” to be interviewed, we had not even been included in the “hundreds” to whom questionnaires had been sent. At 4:53 pm Eastern June 11, they sent me the standard questionnaire. An hour or so later, they emailed Marcel, saying that they were “interviewing dozens of scientists and other stakeholders with insight and views on the IPCC process, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick”.

The email enclosing the questionnaire began:

The InterAcademy Council has established a committee to conduct an independent review of the policies and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A critical element of the committee’s analysis is the opinions of knowledgeable experts and thoughtful observers regarding IPCC’s processes and procedures for producing assessments. Only a few such individuals can interact with the committee at each meeting. Consequently, the committee has carefully selected a limited number of thoughtful individuals to provide written comments. On behalf of the committee chair, Harold Shapiro, and vice-chair, Roseanne Diab, I would like to invite you to respond to the questions below.

They told Marcel that the questionnaire had been sent to “hundreds” of scientists, but their email to me told me that “the committee has carefully selected a limited number of thoughtful individuals” and that I was fortunate enough to be chosen. It must have been a lucky day for me as I got several emails from people in Africa telling me that they had also carefully selected me as their beneficiary. If all of these careful selections prove out, it will have been a good day.

Update June 13: I just sent out the following email to William Kearney:

William Kearney
Director of Media Relations
U.S. National Academy of Sciences

In a recent email to Marcel Crok on behalf of the InterAcademy Review of IPCC, you stated that “members of the committee are interviewing dozens of scientists and other stakeholders with insight and views on the IPCC process, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick”.

In fact, no member of the committee has made any effort or request to interview either McKitrick nor me. You should write to Crok withdrawing this untrue statement.

Nor, as at the time of Crok’s letter, had we even been included among the “hundreds” of scientists and stakeholders to whom questionnaires had been sent – a point that you also withheld from Crok.

Re: j ferguson (Jun 12 16:38), Indeed. As per the my previous comments in another thread, it’s important to check to see how many different ways such missives can be parsed and to realise that the most common and obvious interpretation can be untrue while other, less obvious, interpretations remain true. Of course, such feats of verbal engineering are defended when made by the faithful, while being derided when made by the heathens, but that’s politics\\\\\\\ life, isn’t it?

Mr. Ferguson, customary English employs “such as” to list examples from a set. To denote examples not in a set, use “similar to”. If you think that this rule is too restrictive, please provide an example external to this post.

Mr. Campbell, I had no idea that “such as” constrained the examples to the referenced set. I don’t suspect that an external example demonstrating that someone else could have also made this mistake would be helpful. Thanks for pointing this out.

Mr. Campbell, Isn’t it possible that McIntyre and McKitrick’s names are used as examples to identify the set from which the interviewees will be drawn and yet not themselves be drawn?
I thought this was my inference.

One really wonders why organizations like this make untrue statements, when they are certain to be checked.

There comes a point where making untrue statements and getting away with it is done deliberately, to show that one has power over one’s enemies. This is how totalitarian regimes have operated, for example.

The way McIntyre and McKitrick have been treated with such casual deceptiveness throughout the four so-called inquiries is an indicator of how close some people seem to think they have got to that level.

Steve,
Please post their questions and your answers when completed. I would very much like to see your ideas. For my part, I would like to the IPCC publish a Minority Report which can report the evidence from peer-reviewed journal articles the majority has neglected, such as the Bratcher and Giese paper of 2002 which predicted a cool climate regime lasting 30 years or so based on observations of the Pacific Ocean (similar to the cool climate regime seen from 1945-1975).

The Minority Report may also put natural climate variability into proper historical perspective. It may compare the 2007 arctic ice minimum to the low seen in 1944 when the Northwest Passage opened up. Certainly it cannot compare satellite data, but it could compare other measurements and describe how quickly the arctic sea ice returned in the late 1940s.

The IPCC Majority and Minority reports taken together may provide policymakers with a more accurate view of the totality of climate science.

Despite Michael Oppenheinmer’s opinion, the first new rule for AR5 should be to obey the IPCC rules and correct the many
infringments of A4.

Also, there is a great deal of unfinished science business in AR4, business that rightly raises suspicion in the public. Put bluntly, AR4 is on the nose and needs sanitising before an AR5 is released, even if this causes delay. Examples include the siting of temperature stations, the discreditied hockey stick poised for another thrust, the dendro divergence since 1960, the post 2007 advances from new instruments such as satellites for sea level measurement and above all, an explanation as to why the global models are so unrealistic from then to now.

We could all benefit form more evidence that CO2 is really an important player. An AR5 that tries to “wing it” on the CO2 story of AR4 just ain’t going to fly.

I worked for the Government here in Australia for a number of years. I worked in a legal section responsible for dealing with FOI requests and various complaints/claims etc etc against the Department.

I am not surprised at all by the machinations of administrators under challenge. Still less by the untruths, halftruths and (rarely) outright denials, dished out to ordinary punters when fault is exposed.

In my experience, it is naive to think that such people will ever ‘come clean’. None of their interests are served by doing so. The trick (I know, I know) is to put time and ‘administrative distance’ between the facts and the person responsible. Time will bring changes of regime, promotion, new appointments, reorganisations and a dozen other things which serve to isolate the adminstrator from the effects of his/her actions.

Frequently, this takes the form of some action to which the adminstration can point so as to claim that the matter is being dealt with. Enquiries are perfect for this purpose. One can claim that one is unable to comment until the enquiry is concluded. Then one can point to the results and avoid all responsiblity for the conclusions reached. Such an enquiry can be extended almost indefinitely; the members can be chosen to achieve a desired result; if the enquiry is at fault then it is the members not the adminstration which can be blamed.

On Pielke jnr’s site Richard Tol does not mention when he was informed that the Irish Government would not pay his expenses but it could be related to the Euro crisis. Some European governments are introducing dramatic austerity measures to reduce their deficit levels.

Ireland’s measures include public-sector pay cuts of up to 20%, reductions in child benefits, tax rises, and nurses, teachers, and police officers being laid off.

Before the IAC panel was announced I wrote to the Canadian delegate to the IAC asking how evidence would be gathered and whether I could make a submission. He referred me to someone at the IAC, to whom I wrote, but never received a reply. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting drafts sent to me by colleagues (such as Richard Tol), who had received the questionnaire and were sending in their responses.

Like Steve, I finally got my “carefully selected” email on Friday afternoon, conspicuously a short time after they received Marcel’s query and just before they replied to him.

Yes, I know there is a button on the IAC website where any member of the public can send in evidence. But the track record of IPCC inquiries in dealing with unsolicited public submissions is a joke.

I don’t know what they meant by their email to Marcel. They have not contacted me for an interview. Like Steve I have to wonder why these panels make obviously untrue statements that are easily checked? If they were trying to be clever by saying they have lined up an interview with someone “such as” me, I would sure like to know who that person is. And if they were wanting to find someone “such as” me or Steve to interview, why not save the bother and just interview us?

I wonder who are these people “…such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick..”? Let’s wait to see who they actually interview to see if they interview anyone who is not an IPCC inner sanctum member. SM and RM could give some interesting insights such as IPCC appointing people to review their own work, discounting or deleting review comments, inserting literature that was peer reviewed after the deadline, etc. Why use the imitation when you can get the real thing?

Judith, interesting link. Oppenheimer et al. accepts that the IPCC summaries do not represent well the content of the underlying technical sections, in particular underestimating uncertainty outlined in those sections. However, the paper’s authors are mostly concerned with extending the uncertainty of IPCC projection, notably the worse-case scenarios.
I think many of the readers here are more concerned about the IPCC’s underestimation of the uncertainty in the attribution of warming among anthropogenic sources (and in particular CO2, since that is the focus of most if not all mitigation policies under consideration) vs. non-anthropogenic sources. Uncertainty in the historical record comes into play here, as the size of historical climate variation vs. the known causes, implies a sizable uncertainty in our enumeration of natural variation. (What we know we don’t know.)
The lack of causative processes included in the IPCC GCM models does not seem to be considered as a source of uncertainty in those models’ projections. Instead, it seems that the IPCC is happy to estimate uncertainty by using the spread among multiple runs of multiple models, which to my mind is simply a matter of ignoring the (difficult-to-quantify) elephant while focussing on those elements more easily amenable to quantification.
One of Oppenheimer et al.’s suggestions is to include “expert elicitations”. To my mind, this would seem to serve the purposes of those wishing to promote the scarier scenarios. For example, http://www.pnas.org/content/106/13/5041.full.pdf represents an example of expert elicitation regarding climatic “tipping points”. One of the topics is the possibility of a “largely ice-free state” of the Greenland Ice Sheet” before the year 2200. Despite the fact that one respondent calculated that the GIS would take a minimum of 600 years to melt, the other experts’ responses were duly tallied and combined to produce a seemingly convincing consensus that full GIS melt was a likely event within the original time frame.
The PNAS paper has convinced me that “expert elicitation” is a vehicle for promoting scary scenarios without the inconvenient requirement of evidence.

John Christy is one of four ‘stakeholders’ invited to present at the public session in Montreal on Tuesday. Have to say that’s a good choice, as is doing that session in public. But the grasp of detail that Steve and Ross have shown not just on the maths and the data of the Hockey Stick (and on Urban Heat Islands in Ross’s case) but on the IPCC process leading to Assessment Report and the Summary for Policymakers, warrants the most detailed attention from anyone serious in doing this investigation. They clearly haven’t been serious and the response to Marcel Crok is lamentable in its deceptiveness in trying to cover up the fact.

Richard, thank you for the info. It is good to know Christy has been invited. I agree that Steve and Ross are the experts on the Hockey Stick. No one can explain it better or counter misunderstandings more clearly. I also agree the IAC has not been serious or thorough.

Roger Pielke Sr has written pretty thoroughly on how the IPCC has ignored land cover/land use changes, which Roger describes as a first order climate forcing. I would love to see the next IPCC assessment report discuss this issue.

I don’t know what the budget constraints are for this effort, but it seems to me if the budget is limited they ought to be focusing on the skeptics if they want to learn anything. Only one skeptic out of the four? And why the co-lead author of Working Group II? If you are going to have a lead author, it should be from WGI. Working Group II can be fixed by just sticking to peer-reviewed literature. Do you know how many of these meetings they intend to have? Is it just the one?

I emailed the IAC on 18 March stating my wish to make a submission and asking for any requirements they had. I got no reply but sent a submission on 24 May which was acknowledged. On 8 June I also sent them my ICCER submission after Steve pointed out that it was not going to look into IPCC procedures. If anyone wants a copy of either or both and agrees not publish them just email me at crusub@*****.net where ***** is that big supermarket.

For what its worth, I clicked on the button and submitted my thoughts to the IAC. Here they are:

I suggest changes to the IPCC assessment process in three key areas.

First, the IPCC charter needs to be restated. Currently it contains this language;
“The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

This language wrongly assumes all climate change is human-induced. Future assessment reports should discuss current understanding of 19th and 20th century climate variation which occurred prior to the rapid rise of atmospheric CO2 after World War II. Only after people understand the amplitude of natural climate change is it possible to attribute more recent change between human and natural causes.

Second, the IPCC has been criticized for failing to respond to helpful comments by reviewers if those comments pointed to a less alarmist outlook on climate change. One suggestion is that lead authors should not be assessing their own papers. This is a conflict. In addition, the IPCC should publish a Minority Report which can report the evidence from peer-reviewed journal articles the majority has neglected. The Minority Report can be written by reviewers of the chapter.

The IPCC Majority and Minority reports taken together may provide policymakers with a more accurate view of the totality of climate science.

Third, the Summary for Policymakers would contain a summary of information from both the Majority Report and the Minority Report.

DeNihilist,
After all the news about Climategate, any reader of AR5 has to wonder what peer-reviewed science the IPCC is not telling. The Minority Report simply gathers that science and presents it in a way to answer that question.

Judith,
I read the link but could not find any content regarding your “team B” approach. What is the idea exactly? Is team A fired and team B going to write AR5? If not, what are you proposing team B do exactly?

I am proposing that team B are the reviewers of AR5. As these review comments come in, the lead authors (not people assessing their own papers) evaluate the comments and actually make changes. If they refuse to make changes, they can explain in AR5 why certain papers are discounted. In this way, the lead authors of AR5 are not blindsided by Minority Report.

The Minority Report can be written after the Majority Report is completed. If the process worked well, the Minority Report would be very short. If it did not work well, it will be lengthy.

Ron, Team B is just a concept of taking a hard look at the thing, trying to poke holes in it and come up with alternative explanations/predictions/whatever. Basically a “skeptical” activity. Apparently the military uses this kind of strategy fairly frequently see this wikipedia description.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B. Note this particular team B example isn’t particularly laudatory, but i think the concept is useful.

Steve: Ross suggested the use of a “tiger team” long ago in a different context – to work through the “best” model and produce an independent opinion. Something like this would cost real dollars and is not something that could be done by people working part-time as a casual interest. If it were done in the challenging way of space station engineering, in my opinion, it would be healthy for the debate – in the sense of yielding a valid audit of a climate model. Such a tiger team study would that the authors of the study selected cooperate with the tiger team by providing data and assistance, rather than subverting the exercise.

A big tiger team study by truly independent and properly funded people would, in my opinion, go a long way to reassuring the considerable number of people who worry that the modeling enterprise, however well-meaning the proponents believe themselves to be, is an exercise in groupthink by activists that they don’t particularly trust.

Judith,
I think I understand the general concept and agree it is useful. I guess I’m trying to challenge you to flesh out your idea in more concrete terms. Is it an IPCC team B or an AGU team B or what exactly? How would team B effect the AR5, if at all? Who gets to pick who is on team B?

“A big tiger team study by truly independent and properly funded people would, in my opinion, go a long way to reassuring the considerable number of people who worry that the modeling enterprise, however well-meaning the proponents believe themselves to be, is an exercise in groupthink by activists that they don’t particularly trust.”

Steve, do you mean that this exercise might relieve our anxiety that current modeling is an exercise in groupthink – or confirm it? seemed unclear.

Actually Steve I think the idea of a team B, engineering-style GCM reassessment was your idea. The analogy is from both intelligence reanalysis teams and from aerospace engineering, where I understand the term “Tiger Team” is sometimes used. An aerospace firm will establish an independent group in-house to launch a thorough attack on their own product design, on the view that it is better they find the problems themselves rather than wait in case flaws are discovered after a product goes to market.

The analogy I prefer for reforming the IPCC is an adversarial court system, where evidence is subject to cross-examination in open court. Right now the IPCC is like a court where the prosecutor also sits as the judge (and sometimes even serves as the chief witness), evidence can be brought into court even after the trial is over defence has gone home, and there is no appeal.

“Third, the Summary for Policymakers would contain a summary of information from both the Majority Report and the Minority Report.”

No offence meant, but that’s not realistic. The report has to be a definitive statement of consensus or it’s useless in influencing policy. That handicaps the ultimate truth of the report, which is why it’s important not to focus on it as an ultimate arbiter, but it’s necessary to sacrifice a small amount of accuracy in order for the report to be useful. It would be nice to think that policy makers will weigh the majority and minority views and decide accordingly, but if the report’s been compiled properly in the first place, that will have been done as well as possible. The benefit is merely to provide a safety net against the report being deliberately biassed by the writers, but the huge downside is that in practice a system of majority/minority views is a license for the policy-making politicians to pick whatever view supports what they want to do.

“Meanwhile, members of the committee are interviewing dozens of scientists and other stakeholders”

Ah yes, those stakeholders. Post Normal Science at its worst.

Let’s imagine I’m an ex-politician with a financial interest in certain dubious carbon trading schemes. I guess that makes me a “stakeholder”, right? Does the IAC then evaluate my ill-informed opinions as being on a par with scientists who have dedicated their professional lives to climate science?

Maybe I’m also famous and have sold a lot of DVDs. Does that add weight to my opinion in the the eyes of the IAC?

All four of the speakers at this IAC meeting are past or present IPCC chairs or authors.
I was going to say the speakers were probably selected on the advice of the Royal Society, but someone else got there first.
Like the other “independent” inquiries, the case for the prosecution is being made by the defence.

I am not going to hold my breath until the IAC comes out with a critial report of the IPCC and I will probably be dead before the IPCC comes out with an objective summary stating matters fairly and admitting their previous errors and misstatements. It’s not going to happen. That would be like the whole bunch climbing on a scaffold, putting ropes around their necks and waving bye-bye.

William Kearney
Director of Media Relations
U.S. National Academy of Sciences

In a recent email to Marcel Crok on behalf of the InterAcademy Review of IPCC, you stated that “members of the committee are interviewing dozens of scientists and other stakeholders with insight and views on the IPCC process, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick”.

In fact, no member of the committee has made any effort or request to interview either McKitrick nor me. You should write to Crok withdrawing this untrue statement.

Nor, as at the time of Crok’s letter, had we even been included among the “hundreds” of scientists and stakeholders to whom questionnaires had been sent – a point that you also withheld from Crok.

I am not a scientist, just an interested layman. However, there seems to be an “800 lb gorilla” in the room that is being ignored. Most of the posts above refer to either C02 warming or non-anthropomorphic effects. The “800 lb gorilla” is non-C02 anthropomorphic effects.

Numerous and difficult to quantify or study, but possibly very potent. Sometimes nature isn’t as neat obvious as we like to assume it is.

Did anyone besides me try to listen to the IAC audio webcast yesterday? The link just gave a recorded message. No explanation was given at the Review website. I received no reply to an email to the Secretariat asking if it would appear.

Actually, the most favorable defense of the IAC position that I can see amounts to (in effect) the following:

All the scientists consulted are mortal;
McIntyre is mortal;
Therefore, scientists “such as” McIntyre have been consulted.

Just substitute “have/has views on the IPCC process” for “are/is mortal”.

The problem, as was already suggested by Jeff Campbell, is that “such as” means “for example”; it does not mean “like”.

“Like” can, in fact, be taken to mean “for example” in certain cases.

But in many other cases, “like” either can or must be understood to mean “similar to”.

Thus, one cannot say that, just because “like” might sometimes mean “for example”, that “such as” is always equivalent to “like” or is an equivalent substitute for “like”.

The foregoing seems to me to be an important point, because if it is not stated clearly and quickly, then the opponents of Steve McIntyre have an open door to argue in the alternative, whenever it might be convenient for them to do so, and however unsupportable their argument might be. But the mere fact that they try to make the argument will carry weight with some, and therefore I believe it can only help to state the obvious truth explicitly and up front, before it becomes a point of contention between Mcintyre/McKitrick and their opponents.